Sunday, February 23, 2014

The American Constitution and Ayn Rand's "Inner Contradiction"

After about six months of publication, my book is #87 of the top 100 in the following Amazon Kindle category: Books> Legal Theory & Systems> Judicial Systems.

I almost didn't write the following, because how immodest it may appear But there's too much at stake here, so I have. This is a very important book. There is nothing like it. It can influence contemporary political thinking in the United States.
As those of you who know me and/or my legal and other work, I did not write this book to make money. I wrote it for another kind of profit: To make the case about what has been wrong with the American constitutional/legal system from Day One--in the hope that recognition of the disease might lead to a cure, or at least an amelioration of symptoms.

At the risk of repeating myself, here are the Preface and Introduction to The American Constitution and Ayn Rand's "Inner Contradiction." [Notes have been omitted.]

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Preface

Like many other Americans, for years I’ve been deeply
concerned about our nation’s future. My fears have been exacerbated in the past
three years because of the often lawless, anti-American, recklessly incompetent
reign of Barack Obama. Worse, his presidency will continue for another year.
Even worse, he might be reelected.

In light of that possibility, consider a recent report in The Weekly Standard of a survey
commissioned by the American Revolution Center, which found that nearly 83
percent of Americans failed a simple test of knowledge about the founding of
the United States of America.

Many of our fellow citizens believe that the founding
principles of this nation are passé, that the Declaration of Independence’s
ringing endorsement of republican institutions, individual
rights, and limited governmentis outdated, that the
Constitution’s creation of a representative republic belongs to a time gone by,
and that the Bill of Rights is not a restraint on government but rather a
source of newly found, invented “rights.”

Along with this woeful ignorance, and largely because of it,
the Constitution of the United States of America and the Bill of Rights—rooted
in republican institutions, individual rights and limited government—are under
an unprecedented attack by Barack Obama and his far left Democratic Party,
aided and abetted by the complicit mainstream media, unions, academia, and
entertainment industry. To say nothing of many courts, including the Supreme
Court of the United States
in more than a few cases.

Employing and
legitimizing the exercise of statist power, the Supreme Court of the United States
has facilitated state legislatures and Congress in their sacrifice of
individual rights to the common good, and made a mockery of the Founders’
creation of a limited government.

But with a few notable exceptions there is hardly any
knowledgeable, explicit and principled defense of our Constitution and Bill of
Rights to be found anywhere.

Not on radio, television, or in Hollywood. Not in the press. Not at the
grassroots. Certainly not in academia. Nor, sadly, emanating from many
Republicans, Conservatives, and Libertarians. Most of the media’s pontificating
so-called constitutional experts, especially those on national television,
usually do more harm than good because they spread disinformation that is
neither knowledgeable nor principled. And note, for example, the Republican
presidential candidates’ pitiful and embarrassing “debates.”

While many Tea Party activists and other patriots have been
valiantly fighting for core constitutional values, many of them are disarmed
because they’ve been taught little about American constitutional law. In order
to defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, everyone fighting for America today
needs to know much more about these two documents than most of them know.

Those who are committed to fighting for America’s future are
obligated to acquire at least a basic understanding of the Constitution’s
origins and birth, its written text, the manner in which it has been
deliberately violated, and the consequences of how it has been deliberately misinterpreted
by its enemies.

Because of the importance of our struggle, about eighteen
months ago I put aside most of my writing and legal work to offer a
twenty-hour, ten-lecture Internet course on American constitutional law(Those
unfamiliar with my credentials and my commentaries on legal and political
issues can peruse my blog, http://www.henrymarkholzer.blogspot.com,
and my website, http://www.henrymarkholzer.com.)
The Internet course was successful, but some of the listeners expressed
disappointment that the lectures weren’t available in a permanent text form.

They are now.

The entire twenty hours of lectures have been transcribed, and
I have edited them for a less extemporaneous, more polished presentation, and
added new material.

The result of my labors is this book: The American Constitution and Ayn Rand's "Inner Contradiction. Because
my goal is to maximize readership—especially during the months before the
November 2012 election—The American
Constitution and Ayn Rand's "Inner Contradiction is priced at $4.99. It
is now available on most digital readers, including Kindle. [Note: it is now $2.99 on Kindle.]

If you find The
American Constitution and Ayn Rand's "Inner Contradiction worthwhile,
I have two requests. One is that you inform everyone you know about this
project, and ask them to do the same. This goes double for all Tea Partiers,
because most of them have their own lists containing the names of like-minded
folks. Second, please write a positive review on Kindle and as many other
places as possible.

Introduction

I’ve written this book for two reasons. First, to provide
patriotic Americans with an overview of the Constitution’s most important
provisions as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States.At the same time, I want to demonstrate something unknown to
virtually all Americans: that foundational to every political, social, economic
and legal system are ethical principles, and that from our nation’s earliest
days to the present there has been an ethical leitmotif running through the
Court’s most important decisions affecting individual rights and limited
government. Not all their decisions, but many—and some of the most important
ones.

As to that leitmotif, that recurring theme, a short version
of my personal journey to its discovery will be useful.

In law school, I studied English common law and its
influence on the American legal system. What I learned was a revelation. I came
to realize that from the days of the common law to my days in law school in the
late 1950s, the principles of individual rights and limited government had
consistently been sacrificed to what was perceived as “the common good.” I
learned, as we shall see in Chapter 1, that the ink was barely dry on the Bill
of Rights when the new federal government began to violate individual rights
and renege on the constitutional promise of limited government. (The states had
done so even before the Bill of Rights was enacted.)

In almost every law school course (especially Constitutional
Law) dealing with the power of the government and its delicate (and usually
adverse) relationship to individuals (especially constitutional law, it quickly became apparent to me that
much of the blame for violating those rights and repudiating that promise fell
on state and federal courts in general and the Supreme Court of the United
States in particular—the latter, ironically, the supposed guardian of the
Constitution.

The problem wasn’t with any particular court at any
particular time, or even with whether particular judges were “liberals” or
“conservatives.” The problem was that the state and federal judiciaries consistently
upheld the constitutionality of laws enacted by legislatures and approved by
executive branches that violated the principles of individual rights and
limited government.

From the time I graduated in 1959 until 1972 I practiced
privately, specializing in constitutional law. I represented, among others:
defectors fleeing communism for freedom in the West; physicians choking on
government over-regulation, who couldn’t properly serve their patients; young
men resisting the draft and the nightmare of Vietnam; “gold bugs” seeking to
protect their assets from government-induced inflation and other schemes to
destroy wealth; political candidates struggling against First
Amendment–strangling campaign finance laws; publishers defying censorship;
asylum-seekers battling the then-INS; homeowners trying to preserve their
neighborhoods from do-gooder housing-integration federal judges; and students
on the wrong end of affirmative action programs.

In general, I represented constitutionalists challenging,
and defending themselves against, the explosion of government power that
violated the principles of individual rights and limited government.

In 1972, while continuing my full-time law practice, I
became a full-time law professor.

For many of those years of practicing, teaching and writing,
a recurring question bedeviled me: What
subverted America’s
founding principles of individual rights and their necessary corollary, limited
government?

I found the answer to that question—and the leitmotif of
this book—in an eight-word sentence written by the late Ayn Rand: “America’s ‘inner contradiction’ was the
altruist-collectivist ethics."

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Amazon reviews, even simple blurbs, continue to be welcome--especially
in this political climate, where more and more politicians (e.g., Cruz,
Paul, Ryan) openly acknowledge some influence from Ayn Rand on their
thinking.

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About Me

In college (BA, NYU, 1954), I studied Russian and political science and later served in Korea with United States Army Intelligence. After law school (JD, NYU, 1959) for some 55 years I practiced constitutional and appellate law. From 1972 to 1993 I taught at Brooklyn Law School, where I am now professor emeritus. My courses included Constitutional Law, Appellate Advocacy, National Security, and First Amendment. A bibliography of my writing can be found at my blog of June 29, 2012. See also www.henrymarkholzer.com.